If you're anything like me (protip: don't be anything like me), you'll remember the short-lived VR craze with some hipster-grade ironic nostalgia, but mostly with disappointment. William Gibson had promised us digital otherworlds over a decade ago, and all we got was The Lawnmower Man. And that wasn't even a documentary, people!

But! Now some punk called Palmer Luckey, who has the temerity to be only 20 years old, is all like "hey, here's this Oculus Rift VR headset I just crapped out this morning and BTW it's the most awesome shit you peasants have ever seen" AND HE'S NOT WRONG.

AND! On top of that we have the Leap Motion guys and their millimetre-precision doodad taking a big enough crap on the Kinect that Asus are offering aforementioned doodad as an option with their PCs. We'll ignore the oh-so-90s Best Buy retail exclusivity.

It's not like it's heavy reading. Mostly just a bunch of journalists going "OMG you guyz this is awesome".

It really looks like we're finally getting some of the gear that science fiction has had us waiting on for years. I felt like tech progress had stalled - all we've been getting recent was incremental improvements. 3GS, 4, 4S, 5, etc. And suddenly there are New Toys. Or maybe I've just not been paying enough attention.

"One part disembowels me while another slowly eats its way through the gas line. As I bleed out on the floor, it reminds me that I need to buy milk." - Jibble

As sad as it is, I might have to agree with Squeaky. I mean, in terms of any significant penetration, we'll just get more locative games and augmented worlds (a la Gibson's latest trilogy) and if they're any successful, the same shit on glasses a la Dennou Coil.

Also, we'll get content for those not from pro developers, but from cheap gamification tricks combined with fun building tools (a la Minecraft Reality).

I don't want to have to continually jump out of the way of people fighting giant locative hornets when I go out for a pint of milk. Also it rains outside. If you live here, it rains outside ALL THE FUCKING TIME. Indoors: Fuck Yeah.

"One part disembowels me while another slowly eats its way through the gas line. As I bleed out on the floor, it reminds me that I need to buy milk." - Jibble

What might be huge is if they do locative bullshit but have it inside. So you drive to it at a shopping centre, like it's a cinema, and it's a cross between laser skirmish and something something sex with Jessica Alba.

I would be interested in a device that provides a complete sensorium into movies and games. I already like to wear headphones because of the increased immersion, I imagine glasses would fit with that.

I'm not convinced games need to be remade with VR specific features though, if the goggles can project a huge virtual high-resolution screen suitable for movies the same should work great for games. I can see some games working amazingly with headtracking, like a mech game where looking can easily be separated from the direction of your avatar, but for many games just give me the big projected screen.

Truly high-refreshrate head tracking would be exciting because I think wearing goggles will be more comfortable if the projected screen respects the small movements you make with your head, but I don't know how low latency they can accomplish. I think the main battle is going to be resolution and image quality, I could see these new VR devices lacking the clout to pull off truly high-quality displays and then their point kind of diminishes for me.

Interesting times though.

"Roses are red, violets are blue, rubbish is dumped and so are you.":: - FML

Well, if 3D movies can come back from where we left them in the 80s, why not revisit the nineties as well? It still baffles me that something seen as a gimmick 30 years ago can come back fundamentally unchanged (where user experience is concerned, content creation is much easier now) and suddenly it takes off.

Maybe we can also bring the term 'interactive multimedia' back and Philips can reimage the CDi.

She's probably had sex with like 4 different guys by now and has no idea who he is anymore, his face lost in a memory sea of dicks.

There's a difference in technique between how they do 3D now and how they did it in the 80s, gunpo1nt, and an even bigger gap in terms of result. I do think the current love affair that the studios have with 3D is fleeting though.

I'm not convinced about VR either - or even AR, for that matter. I suspect the former will be as gimmicky as it was in the 90s and that the latter will fail to live up to anyone's expectation and will cause more problems than it solves.

Cool link TreeFrog, thanks. Latency is clearly an issue with head tracking. Maybe full 6 DOF head tracking is overkill though, maybe it'd be good enough to start with 3 rotational DOF to get head orientation right and we worry about position later.

But that's just the VR, more fundamentally to me is the resolution and refresh rates. The blog describes these as big painpoints. If the displays aren't great then the point of using goggles seems a bit lost on me.. but I entered some values into a display density calculator and it says 4k resolution stereo displays to get anywhere. If that even does it, it was actually north of 8k to get close to 'retina'-like pixel densities (because the displays are so close to the eye).

And that's at 240+ hz if we want VR/AR. Man, things are still a long way off, I'm fully prepared for the Oculus to disappoint. It looks like I get to go to GDC this year, maybe I can find my way to Valve's VR talk to hear how they're doing.

"Roses are red, violets are blue, rubbish is dumped and so are you.":: - FML

I suspect VR may be a little like the Wii in that while it's a fun diversion, we're eventually going to move on from anything that requires us to do more than slump on a sofa, motionless except for our monstrously overdeveloped thumbs.

That said, I'd love to play around with one, tie it into a Thief-esque game and it could be awesome. Shooters might be a problem if you had to use the headset to aim... well unless you own shares in a company that makes those neckbraces.

There's a difference in technique between how they do 3D now and how they did it in the 80s, gunpo1nt, and an even bigger gap in terms of result.

I'm sure the technology is different but I'm really not seeing a lot of difference between seeing 3D movies now and seeing Captain EO way back when except that the goggles are flimsy plastic instead of flimsy cardboard.

She's probably had sex with like 4 different guys by now and has no idea who he is anymore, his face lost in a memory sea of dicks.

I'm not convinced about VR either - or even AR, for that matter. I suspect the former will be as gimmicky as it was in the 90s and that the latter will fail to live up to anyone's expectation and will cause more problems than it solves.

I don't know AR could be extremely useful for a lot of productivity problems. I can imagine quite a few great uses in warehouse style work. Order picking using an AR HUD that allows a human to decide the most efficient route to everything instead of hoping the system managed it or adaptive sorting that's aware of what's arriving and places things in the most efficient locations falling back to the AR to let people know those locations instead of remaining constant regardless of inefficiency for example. Problem is those kind of things would be most useful in low wage high turn over companies that aren't about to pay for something like this.

There are still places that use a largely manual process, thus the low wages and high turnover. You also get into a situation where that process can be better setup to separate manual and powered tasks since any violation of that process can mean instant termination (with a reduced learning period you don't really have to care any more).

Also I think you're assuming the AR itself will be far more intrusive then really necessary. Following around a virtual arrow like it's some localized GPS is exactly what you don't want. You just want adaptive location labeling taking the place of normal set signage and/or object highlighting (think along the lines of how Deus Ex handles interactive objects).

I'm sure the technology is different but I'm really not seeing a lot of difference between seeing 3D movies now and seeing Captain EO way back when except that the goggles are flimsy plastic instead of flimsy cardboard.

The technology may have changed but the method of creating the effect is still just polarized light putting different images on each eyeball. Until there is a method of displaying 3D that accounts for the fact that I sometimes move my head and also want to focus on different things, it'll remain a shitty gimmick.

VR doesn't solve the problem since we already have enough lag with regular HDTVs to make games like Assassin's Creed a bitch to play. I can only imagine how much worse it would be in 3D.

"I hope you one day decide to smarten the fuck up so I can stand to look at your posts." - gaggle

It'd be a lot more interesting if Microsoft didn't have a nasty habit of either completely ignoring what the research guys are doing or totally screwing it up while translating it to a finished product.

Shadarr, we've had that for years. The wedge display uses head tracking to beam a projection of a scene stereoscopically onto each of your eyeballs. This means two people can use the same screen to see private scenes in 3d.
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/about/feature/nui.aspx

The 3D comparison doesn't work for me. The film industry resurrected that to try and get people back in cinemas. VR's back on the agenda because the tech involved has finally reached the point where it can render something that isn't just a series of boxes.

"One part disembowels me while another slowly eats its way through the gas line. As I bleed out on the floor, it reminds me that I need to buy milk." - Jibble

Why not? It's both consumer entertainment technology that had its day, was eventually deemed obsolete and is now back in a fundamentally unchanged form.
The fact that computer graphics have significantly improved doesn't so much impact VR specifically because it impacts a much larger range of entertainment forms. It doesn't help to make VR more attractive to consumers, compared to simply sitting on the couch with your Xbox controller, than it was 20 years ago.

Or maybe I'm not getting your angle. You are coming at it from a consumer entertainment angle, right?

She's probably had sex with like 4 different guys by now and has no idea who he is anymore, his face lost in a memory sea of dicks.

But tablets is an old ide too, just revamped with modern technology. So I don't know that it tells me anything that a particular idea has been tried before or not. I do think it's a valid point that 3D was a top-down profit driven decision vs VR being more of a bottoms-up grassrooty thing. Whether that will translate into anything at all I don't know, but it's a relevant difference to me.

"Roses are red, violets are blue, rubbish is dumped and so are you.":: - FML

VR basically needs a killer app. Avatar was supposed to be that for 3D movies, but it wasn't. Apparently the killer app for tablets was old people who can't see an iPhone. For VR to catch on, it's needs a reason to exist beyond virtual real estate tours and slightly more immersive videogames.

"I hope you one day decide to smarten the fuck up so I can stand to look at your posts." - gaggle